


Glasshouse Birds

by cantonforking



Series: Cyclical Eternity [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Domestic, Alternate Universe - Human, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Human Castiel, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-06
Updated: 2013-09-06
Packaged: 2017-12-25 18:32:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/956341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cantonforking/pseuds/cantonforking
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nothing has changed. Castiel still finds it hard to be human and stuck in this town in the middle of nowhere, Castiel feels smaller than ever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glasshouse Birds

**Author's Note:**

> A long time coming, this is the fourth and last entry in my Cyclical Eternity series.

The middle of nowhere, pushed aside, lost in the folds of the map. The Winchesters don’t come by anymore, not since Meg with her soft skin and sharp tongue. Sometimes Castiel thinks it’s better this way. Sometimes he misses the brothers who stood by his side and saved the world.

They call him every now and again, to check up on him, make sure he hasn’t been killed by ‘that crazy bitch’. Sam sighs and takes the phone away from his brother, apologises in tired words. Castiel just ignores them and smiles at her, sleeping in the sunlight, waiting for him to hang up. They call him every now and again, just catching up but they don’t go out to the middle of nowhere.

Their apartment has been rebuilt now, wood and paint and plaster to hide the singed skeleton that was left behind. They were lucky, their apartment wasn’t as black as those below. All the town helped but it still took months to reconstruct the lives that had been charred. It’s all rebuilt, fresh and new, but the smell of smoke still lingers.

\-----------

She takes him for a ride one day, on the back of her motorcycle. His heart races, beating so fast he thinks it will explode and burst out of his chest. He’s not sure what his body is saying but it speaks to him in chemicals tumbling through his veins.

They drive along the silent roads, so fast, so smooth, the wind whistling in his ears. She howls, tosses her head back. Soft hair brushes against his face like fingers of the wind, like angel’s feathers. Her hand slips away from the handlebars to cover his clinging to the front of her jacket. Fingers slip between his and squeeze tight, promise him that he’s safe, that she’ll never let go.

Buildings, fields, farms, animals; they spin past, only there for a second. The sunlight can barely catch them and he thinks they’re faster than time. He throws back his head and laughs and she laughs with him. It feels like they’re untouchable, eternal. It feels like they’re flying.

\-----------

Eventually they must stop, return to the world, return to the little apartment in the middle of nowhere. They are stuck, squashed, held down by gravity and soft flesh. Sitting on that immobile couch, his heart slows until he can feel every beat, every desperate gasp of life. All around him the walls press in until he’s too big, too out of place. They don’t belong and the world knows it.

He doesn’t throw his head back. He doesn’t laugh. It doesn’t feel like he’s flying. She looks worried, climbs up beside him and lets her fingers rest on his chest, over the organs he needs to stay alive.

Brows furrowed, eyes caught on his, she asks him what’s wrong. The stumps on his back ache and itch. He tells her that he wants to fly away, that he wants to see the clouds and the stars and watch the patchwork world from miles above. He tells her that he wants to fly away and never come back.

Pink lips twist in pain and she curls up beside him, pushes her head under his chin. They can’t go back anymore. One form forever; one face, one name, one being. They’re stuck, she tells him, both of them stuck in the middle of nowhere. He pulls her to him, holds her tight. Hair brushes against his skin and it feels like angel’s feathers.

\-----------

She comes home from work one day with a pair of scissors in a plastic bag. A smile pulls at her lips when she sees the confusion on his face. Scissors are for cutting things, slicing them apart, separating one into two. He doesn’t know why she needs these tools.

She provides no explanation, tells him to sit in a chair carefully placed in their bathroom. There’s no arguing with her sharp eyes and soft nails and the scissors she wields in her hand. Fingers brush, whisper against the nape of his neck. She is holding a fistful of hair and he can hear the scrape of metal against the strands.

It all falls away under the blades of the scissors. His head feels lighter, as though a weight has been lifted. Hair falls to the ground in clumps and it seems he’s moulting, shedding his downy winter coat. Her fingers run through what remains, nails scraping lightly against his scalp. Castiel looks up into the mirror and finds he can still recognise himself.

“That was getting too long,” she says in his ear. “I don’t want a heavy metal boyfriend.”

The door swings shut behind her, blowing the little clumps of hair around his feet like lost tumbleweeds.

\-----------

On the top floor of the library, forsaken for fictions fantasy worlds, Castiel finds the history of humanity. From the pyramids he once stood atop to the global wars that killed millions of his father’s children; all the world documented in black ink.

Castiel loses his way among pages of the past. Waves of time crash over him and the present’s forgotten in favour of memories. As the words pass before his eyes he laughs at exaggerations and revels in accuracies. Rambling aloud he corrects mistakes, delving into past times of when he was an angel of God walking among mortals.

When the library closes, Castiel leaves with an atlas under his arm. Mr. Miller stops him in the foyer, crease between his eyebrows, and asks where he has been all day. Castiel doesn’t have an answer. He stares out into the encroaching darkness and wonders what it would be like to see the pyramids through human eyes.

\-----------

Meg comes home to all the world spread across the living room table and Castiel won’t apologise. Instead he traces the Earth through topography and cartography, through ocean depths and mountain peaks. In his mind memories play in careful division, ordered by latitude and longitude like chapters of a book.

The door closes and her shoes clack against the wooden floor. She sits beside him, watches as he traces the expansion of the Roman Empire across seas and continents. Fingers follow the footsteps of Jesus, the demolition of Genghis Khan, the words of Martin Luther King. She says nothing and he wonders if maybe she’s thinking of her own memories.

Once she stands and leaves but it’s only momentary, only a minute’s absence to prepare a meal to sustain their flesh. They eat in silence, necessity becoming automatic movements and later that night, Castiel can’t remember what they ate. All the world’s spread out beneath his hands; he leaves only when she wraps her slender fingers around his wrist and won’t let go.

\-----------

The next day he buys his own atlas, pulls out all the maps and spreads them across the walls of their apartment. They eat opposite Japan. They brush their teeth in Nigeria’s reflection. They sleep underneath the Mediterranean.

He stands in the centre of their apartment, the centre of the world, the burning core of the Earth. States and countries, continents and cities, they flash by him as he spins faster and faster. Her hands guide him, twist him and turn him. She laughs with him and the sound echoes around the world.

When he stumbles, falls to the couch, the world doesn’t stop spinning. He sits inside the Earth as it turns on its axis. Warmth presses against his side and she spins with him.

\-----------

One day, on the top floor of the library, Mr. Weynard visits Castiel. He likes Mr. Weynard, an old police officer, kind and fair beneath his creased forehead. Castiel asks how he can help. There’s another officer with Weynard, one Castiel doesn’t recognise. He says something’s happened. It’s Meg, demon eyes and angel smile. Weynard tells him there’s been an accident and he has blood on his uniform.

Little town in the middle of nowhere. There’s a doctor but no hospital. A helicopter swoops in, carries her away and there’s nothing he can do. She flies away without him and Castiel doesn’t know what to do. Weynard takes his arm and leads him away from the yellow tape, away from the curious eyes and the bloodstains on the road.

\-----------

It takes them years to get to the hospital. Or perhaps it’s minutes. Surely it’s hours. Hours and she’s still in surgery when they arrive. Weynard takes him to a waiting room. There are white walls scattered with medical pamphlets and dog-eared magazines like little coloured tiles. People are sitting, waiting in that room, with white faces like the walls around them. Castiel can’t join the chameleons, doesn’t know how to change his skin. He can’t just sit and wait for someone to tell him what he should already know.

He turns away, picks a direction and walks. Weynard doesn’t stop him, just watches him leave. People pass by him with tears on their faces, blood on their hands, white coats and clipboards. They all have a place to go, a mission. They don’t see him, only look forward to see what’s in their way. He feels like a ghost, an invisible man, an angel among mortals.

But he’s not, he knows he’s not. Red bloodstains on the road, on the car, on the driver that tried to fix what he had broken. She liked to sleep on his chest, ear pressed against his skin to listen to those sounds. Those beats. That proof. Of life. Of breath. Of blood. He’s not an angel among mortals and neither is she. Red stains on the road.

The thoughts are too much for him. Pacing the corridors, he counts rooms and doctors and patients and all the people dying. He thinks it will help, the numbers in his head, filling up his mind until she no longer exists. All these doctors and patients and so many humans dying. In a white room he sees a body lying in a bed. There’s a cross on the wall but Castiel knows, God’s not here.

\-----------

Weynard finds him when the numbers in his head are thousands and he’s running out of space. There’s a doctor with him, dressed in white, glasses pressed to the smooth arch of her nose. A chameleon with a clipboard that says too many words he doesn’t understand. Weynard translates and suddenly Castiel can hear nothing else.

“She’s going to be alright.”

For a moment he thinks, in the fuzz and haze of his mind, that his father’s speaking. These must be the words of God, definitive, all-knowing. This woman standing before him dressed in white, this doctor. She must be God, controller of life and death. Weynard takes his arm and his father’s children lead him forward.

They take him to a room with light blue walls like the ocean’s shallows. She’s lying in the bed, tiny little body dwarfed by grey sheets. Her arms lie by her side, one pink and thin, the other hidden by thick plaster. He takes a step forward and that shadow of God, the doctor in white, reaches out a hand and stops him.

“Be gentle. Her stomach is being held together by stitches. She’s very lucky to be alive.”

Be gentle. It takes him a moment to nod and then she lets him go. There’s a chair beside the bed, waiting for someone to fill it. He pulls it close and sits. Little chameleon, her face is as white as the doctor’s coat. He leans forward and rests his cheek against her skin. The machines sing him a lullaby in her heartbeat and Castiel closes his eyes.

\-----------

It takes months for her to heal. Every day she turns to him and curses the flesh that holds them down. She tells him tales of bodies breaking, of falling from heights and then standing up and laughing at the blood on the pavement. He smiles and traces the stitches on her stomach, angry red against her skin. Hands push him away and her human body is ticklish.

They’ve quit their jobs, both of them. They don’t need the money and Castiel finds hours too long to be away from her. Mr. Miller smiles, says he understands. His wife broke her leg last year and he never wanted to leave her side. Castiel smiles and nods but he isn’t listening.

They sleep beneath the Mediterranean, coloured in light blue, but he knows it’s deeper than it looks. The first couple of weeks she wakes him in the middle of the night, pushes him away when he leans on healing wounds. They sleep with pillows between them and the only skin he feels are fingertips against his cheeks. He hates it, knows that she does too; being so close but still with an ocean between them.

When the weeks have turned into the first month, he can feel her getting restless. It settles under his skin, an itch that isn’t his. Her motorbike’s stored in the garage, no longer out on the pavement. Instead it collects dust like a forgotten toy. Her hands curl into fists and she picks fights with him for no reason. Storms brew between them, waterspouts to pick them up and hurl them together, but he can’t be away, not for long.

It takes months for her to heal but one day the doctor calls and tells him it’s time for the casts and the stitches and the bandages to go. He lets his fingers trace her stomach scars and she doesn’t push him away, just laughs and squirms. He kisses her and she smiles and smiles and her teeth gleam white.

They don’t get their old jobs back, don’t even try. There’s no time. They’ve too many other things to do. Castiel sits on the couch and reads about ancient Rome. Meg stretches out beside him, languishing in the sun. She introduces him to something called ‘rock’ and Castiel finds he likes a band called Scorpions. Meg decides microwave food’s bad and learns to cook. They almost burn the apartment down again.

They draw their own map of the world, one made of all the places they have yet to visit in flesh and bone and broken wings. She wants to cross the Himalayas and walk through Venetian streets. He wishes to swim in the Pacific and see the lights of Tokyo. She wishes to feel the cold fingers of the Antarctic.

And Castiel, he wants to walk in the shadow of Khufu’s pyramid.

\-----------

One day he wakes and she’s pulling the world from the walls of their apartment. Brows creased, heart hurting, he asks her what she’s doing. He spins, watching the white walls spinning with him and asks if she wants to forget about the world.

Hands reach out and catch him, run over his skin and loop around his neck. Her lips press against his and she tells him they’re going to be human together. She presses her head to his chest, listens to his beating heart and tells him that gravity won’t hold them down.

Castiel doesn’t understand yet but they give the apartment to Mr. Weynard, tell him that they’ve no use for it anymore. When he asks where they’re going, she looks at him and smiles.

“We’re astronauts,” she says and her eyes are brown, not black. “We’re going to the moon.”

There are two bags in her hands, all their belongings squeezed in between canvas walls. She hands one to him and tells him to get on her motorbike. They leave the middle of nowhere in a cloud of dust and he never looks back. The ground passes by faster and faster until they are quicker than the speed of sound, quicker than the speed of thought.

She throws her head back against his shoulder and laughs and he laughs with her. They are untouchable, eternal. Their wings are broken but gravity can’t hold them down. Her hair brushes against his cheek and it feels like angel’s feathers. They leave the middle of nowhere, fly across the map, and Castiel never looks back.


End file.
